Unity will no longer be rolling out its controversial Runtime Fee, but it will be raising prices for subscribers to Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise.
In a post on Unity’s blog, new CEO Matthew Bromberg explained: “After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee for our games customers, effective immediately.”
“We’re reverting to our existing seat-based subscription model for all gaming customers, including those who adopt Unity 6, the most performant and stable version of Unity yet, later this year.”
The Unity Personal plan will remain free, and the funding and revenue ceiling will be doubled from $100k to $200k. Unity Pro subscribers will see an 8% increase in price to $2,200 per seat per year, effective January 1 2025. Unity Enterprise subscribers will see a 25% subscription price increase, applicable to companies with more than $25m in total annual revenue and funding.
“Because this set of our largest customers have unique needs and use many of our products and services, we’ll be contacting everyone in the days ahead to discuss customized packages,” the blog continued.
“From this point forward, it’s our intention to revert to a more traditional cycle of considering any potential price increases only on an annual basis. Our commitment remains that if we change the Editor software terms in ways that impact you, you may continue using your current version of the software under the previously agreed terms as long as you keep using that version.”
“Canceling the Runtime Fee for games and instituting these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing to improve game development for everyone while also being better partners.”
This marks the end of a turbulent period for Unity. In September 2023 Unity announced the wildly unpopular Runtime Fee policy, which led to many developers organising and joining a Unity boycott later that week. Part of the motivation behind the Runtime Fee policy was to force developers onto Unity’s LevelPlay mediation platform in a bid to ‘kill’ IronSource rival Applovin, we were told.
Unity later apologised and dialled back some of the pricing policies before the company announced the retirement of president, CEO and chairman John Riccitiello the following month.
Sources also told us that the Runtime Fee policy was “rushed out” and driven by Unity and IronSource’s intense battle with mediation rival AppLovin. One major partner apparently said “Fuck you, we’re not paying” to Riccitiello in a meeting over the fee.
Since then, a string of execs have left the firm. Back in January, we broke the news that all of IronSource’s founders were leaving after a six month transition period. Unity merged with IronSource in July 2022 in a landmark deal worth $4.4bn, and has had a turbulent time since.
New Unity boss Matthew Bromberg took over from the last permanent president and CEO, John Riccitiello, in May. Riccitiello left the company in October 2023 after overseeing the runtime fee fiasco. Since then, Unity SVP and CMO Carol Carpenter and Marc Whitten, chief product and technology officer, announced their departures alongside CFO Luis Visoso.
Unity has also recently added two senior execs on the adtech side: new chief product officer for advertising and cofounder of MoPub and Max Jim Payne, plus fellow adtech veteran Alex Blum, who is Unity’s new SVP of corporate development.
